As 2010 began, Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen’s coalition government, though flagging in the opinion polls, might have hoped to run its full term. Indications that the economy was beginning to stabilize in the early months of the year had offered the prospect of better times. Indeed, in introducing his December 2009 budget, Finance Minister Brian Lenihan had declared that the “worst is over.” Events proved him wrong.

The cost of overseas borrowing to finance Ireland’s debt ballooned, triggered by concerns over the failure of Ireland’s 2008 “rescue” of its banks. Amid concerns about the weaker members of the euro zone, international lenders raised bond yields, unhappy about slow progress in Ireland’s resolution of its economic problems. In November Ireland was forced to apply for an IMF and European Central Bank loan package of €85 billion (about $115 billion).

Within days Cowen published a four-year national recovery plan that cut welfare benefits, increased taxes by €15 billion (about $21 billion), and deprived him of the support of his junior coalition partner, the Green Party, which called for an election in mid-January 2011. The scene was set for a showdown between a barely united minority government and a multifaceted opposition over a budget package for 2011 that included €6 billion (about $8 billion) in cuts. On December 7 Cowen succeeded in getting his austerity budget passed. On December 23 Ireland took majority control of Allied Irish Banks by transferring €3.7 billion (about $4.85 billion) from the country’s pension reserves into the bank.

Throughout the year Cowen’s parliamentary majority dwindled as some members of his Fianna Fail party withheld support. To survive, the government had to rely on bilateral deals with independent backbenchers. Rising unemployment and anger over the cost of bailing out Ireland’s banks resulted in historically low opinion poll ratings for Fianna Fail and a sense that the party and its coalition partner were living on borrowed time. Moreover, Lenihan, who had won a measure of personal approval for his firm approach to the banking crisis, announced that he had pancreatic cancer, though he insisted that it was under control. Meanwhile, Fine Gael, Ireland’s second largest party, was the first to show strains over leadership. Poor ratings in opinion polls for its leader, Enda Kenny, at a time when the opposition should have made gains led to a challenge in June from deputy leader Richard Bruton, who failed to topple Kenny.

Unemployment continued to rise and reached 13.5% in November, up from 13.1% in January 2010, having tripled since 2007. In September workers in the hard-hit construction sector voted to reject a pay cut of 7.5%, though in June the government had reached an agreement with public-service workers designed to avoid further pay cuts and redundancies until 2014. Consumer prices were little changed at 0.7% higher in October than a year earlier. Housing prices, however, were a different matter. It was reported that 2,800 housing developments that contained more than 40,000 dwellings were either unsold or unfinished. Many Irish homeowners found that their outstanding loans exceeded the market price of their homes as average national house prices fell to 2002 levels, 36% off their 2006 peak.

Child sexual-abuse scandals, much in the news in past years, continued to have ramifications for the Roman Catholic Church in 2010. In a message to Irish Catholics in March that acknowledged the suffering of the victims, Pope Benedict XVI wrote, “Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated.” He identified inadequate screening of candidates for the priesthood; poor moral, spiritual, and intellectual formation in seminaries; and misplaced concern for the reputation of the church as having been among the causes of the problem. The pope added that these problems, and the damage they had done, had been addressed. Moreover, he promised an apostolic visitation (a process of review of certain dioceses conducted by Vatican-appointed experts). In a commentary that accompanied the pope’s text, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin described the papal letter as having recognized “the failure of church authorities in how they dealt with sinful and criminal acts.”

Noting a shift in tone, observers believed that a gap had opened between Pope Benedict and Martin, an Irish-born Vatican diplomat posted in 2003 to Dublin by Benedict’s predecessor in the wake of the child sex-abuse scandals. Dublin auxiliary bishops Eamonn Walsh and Raymond Field had submitted their resignations in December 2009, saying that they hoped their departure might help the survivors of sex abuse. In August 2010, however, Pope Benedict refused to accept their resignations. In response, an editorial in the Irish Independent noted that “church policy is as clear as mud” and characterized the pope’s action as “rejection of the views of the archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Diarmuid Martin.” Groups that represented the survivors took a similar view. The resignations of two other bishops had been accepted earlier in the year.

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